Remembering Nashville

[TerryB]

Can you briefly tell us the key significance of Nashville in the war? I always like to get the perspective of a native, who usually has a little different perspective that the rest of us may lack, as we haven't done quite the reading or visited all the venues. And thank you, if we get that way, we'll take you up on a tour.

Nashville was a rail hub and a a huge port on the Cumberland River. When Sherman thrust into Georgia in the spring of 1864, his major supply base was Nashville. The Confederates tried to do a couple of things to counteract this, including having Wheeler and Forrest (independently of each other) destroy his railroads out of Nashville. Each commander was pushed back by the Union forces based here, and Sherman was always able to very quickly repair damage to the railroads. The second CS action came late in the war when Hood laid siege to the city, whose capture or destruction of its supply base, might have prolonged the war, but certainly would not have changed the outcome.
http://civilwartalk.com/threads/nashvilles-importance-as-a-union-supply-base.76370/#post-524982

 

[TerryB]

@TerryB - I read your Negley article in the past but need to brush up on it again. Do you know if they ever went to houses and demanded their slaves? Or did they just pick up who they could find? I thought any free or slave walking down the street was game but am thinking people could go to Negley and reclaim slaves.

From what I've read, Belle, after awhile the slave owners were not allowed to come to the contraband camp at St. Cloud and reclaim escaped slaves. Soldiers began to resist returning them to the slave owners and even officers could be arrested for returning slaves to their owners. Some sources say that most of the laborers were escaped slaves, but many freed people were caught--even in church--and taken to the Fort Negley site, where some 2,000 of them worked as stone masons, dug the underground storehouses, blasted the rock, where the women and children served as teamsters, where women cooked, did laundry, cooked for their families and the Union army.

Captain James S. Morton, the engineer in charge of building Fort Negley said, "To the credit of the colored population be it said, they worked manfully and cheerfully, with hardly an exception, and yet lay out upon the works at night under armed guard, without blankets and eating only army rations. They worked in squads military-like companies, each gang choosing their own officers; one was often amused to hear the Negro captains call out: 'You boys over there, let them picks fall easy, or they might hurt somebody."

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James S. Morton

Although cautious at first, the freedmen began to accept working for the Union military and when Forrest attempted to attack the city, they requested arms to defend Fort Negley and when denied them, formed a line with their picks and axes as a demonstration. Many of these laborers would be recruited into military service.

The area where they had remained in the St. Cloud Hill contraband camp even after the completion of Fort Negley would become the black neighborhood of Edgehill in Nashville.[/QUOTE]
After the war, the fort was home to a number of free blacks, but rumor has it the KKK disbursed them and may have used the site themselves for clandestine meetings.

 

[BelleBlackburn]

I just find the whole thing overwhelming. I am about to read The African-American History of Nashville and it may have more detail about the details. (I am always about the details and little things.)